Last year, Spike Lee released a film that tells a side of the WWII story that's conspicuously absent in other WWII films: the involvement of black soldiers. Miracle at St. Anna takes place in Italy, and while the film is not among Lee's most celebrated, its message was rightly told.

Sixty-five years after the liberation of Paris, the BBC has uncovered documents that reveal how the American and British governments manufactured an all-white liberation. They thought it was important to show French nationals leading the effort, so despite the thousands of colonial Africans who fought on the side of the French, only whites were permitted to march on the city's streets in celebration of reclaiming their city.

The leader of the Free French Forces, Charles de Gaulle, told French allies that he wanted his own countrymen to lead the liberation through Paris, to which the Allied High Command agreed but with one stipulations: de Gaulle's division must not have any black soldiers.

In January of 1944 President Eisenhower's chief of staff, Major General Walter Bedell Smith, became complicit in the fabrication, writing in a memo stamped "confidential": "It is more desirable that the division mentioned above consist of white personnel."

But there weren't any 100% white divisions in France at the time, so in order to fill in the gaps, de Gaulle used Spanish, North African and Middle Eastern men as well. And they were selected not because they had been on the front lines along with the French but because they were relatively white-looking.

And to think that WWII was, essentially, a war against prejudice.

[Image: US Government Archives]